As you may be aware, Facebook is making it more difficult for companies and organizations to engage directly with their intended audiences. To counter this (and to make revenue), Facebook offers the ability to boost an individual post so that it shows up in the news feed of your intended audience. These boosted posts can be fairly low-cost, with a minimum boost of $5 per day. So how well do these boosted posts perform and what sort of metrics does Facebook provide? To find out, I boosted a post on Lady Paragon’s Facebook page (a site I run with my sister for Women in STEM careers).
Facebook Post Pre-Boost
Here’s what the post looked like before I boosted it:
The metrics we see are:
- 1 person liked it (red circle)
- There was 1 share (green rectangle)
- 976 people saw the post (blue rectangle)
I boosted this post for 1 day at a budget of $5 and targeted fans & friends of fans of Lady Paragon’s Facebook page.
Facebook Boosted Post Metrics
Here are the metrics after the boost:
The metrics provided are:
- 4 people liked it (red circle) — 1 was from before, which Facebook properly reports in the red circle in the How people engaged with your post section.
- 1 share (green rectangle) — this was from before the boost
- 3102 saw the post (blue rectangle) — Facebook reports that 2079 were from the boost in the Paid Reach box. You can also see the percentage of paid to organic in the box with the 3102 — blue was organic, green was paid
- 4 link clicks (purple circle)
- Engagement of 7 — this is the number of link clicks added to the number of post likes
Facebook Post Insights
When you look at the post in the page Insights, you see the following metrics (more recent data):
The orange bar shows the number of people who viewed the post, divided into lighter orange for organic, darker for paid. 3.1K is pretty close to the 3102 mentioned above. 218 is the number of post clicks and 116 is the number of likes, comments and shares. This is very interesting. Either the boosted metrics didn’t include some of the stats, boosting the post helped increase the organic reach and engagement, or the post received an unusually high number of engaged traffic from some of the people who saw it (remember that when someone likes a post, their network sees that they liked it, at least for a short time period).
Hypothesis: Boosting a Post Improves It’s Organic Reach & Engagement Too
I boosted another post on the same page (same budget $5) and got the following results:
- 1331 Paid Reach
- 5 Engagements – 3 link clicks, 2 post likes
According to the post insights, the post got 15 post clicks and 4 likes, comments and shares. Not nearly as high, so there probably is a difference in the influence of the people who engaged with each post.
If we look at the Google Analytics traffic to the actual post on the website (April 2-April 22), the April 2nd post (Jessica Kirkpatrick) had 338 pageviews (20 from Facebook), while the April 9th post (Kate Synder), had 93 pageviews (77 from Facebook).
Conclusion: Unclear, More Results Needed
The results do tend to show that a boosted post receives more organic engagement, especially if there are people with good influence that do engage with the post. Using good targeting to reach the right audience to improve engagement on a boosted post may provide the most beneficial of results. More testing is needed — I’ll continue to monitor my efforts.
What have you found with Facebook boosted posts?
